My Venice: And Other Essays

Donna Leon

My Venice

and Other Essays

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Donna Leon and Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich

Jacket designby Gretchen Mergenthaler; Jacket photograph © Isolde Ohlbaum

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2036-6

eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9403-9

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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For Judith and Robert Martin

Contents

On Venice

My Venice

On the Beating Heart of the City

Garbage

The Casinò

Gypsies

Italian Bureaucracy

Diplomatic Incident

Non Mangiare, Ti Fa Male

Miss Venice Hilton

New Neighbors

The House from Hell

Shit

Neighbor

Tourists

Da Giorgio

On Poor People

On Music

A Bad Hair Night at the Opera

On Beauty and Freedom in the Opera

Confessions of an American Handel Junkie

Da Capo (Callas)

Anne Sofie von Otter

Deformazione Professionale

On Mankind and Animals

Mice

Hunters

Gladys

Cesare

Badgers

The Woman from Dübendorf (Gastone)

Tell Me You Forgive Me, Professor Grzimek

Moles

Battle Report

Blitz

My First Time Eating Sheep’s Eyeball

On Men

Bosoms

The Italian Man

Instincts

Oh Beautiful Little Foot

It’s a Dick Thing

A Trivial Erotic Game = Okay, So I’m a Puritan

I Want a Few Good Men

The Developer

Saudi Arabia

The New York Man

On America

My Family

Tomato Empire

My Mother’s Funeral

Fatties

We’d All Be Hamburger, Ma’am

On Sprüngli and CNN

The United States of Paranoia

On Books

E-mail Monsters

With Barbara Vine

No Tears for Lady Di

Suggestions on Writing the Crime Novel

On Dinner with an American Physician

ON VENICE

My Venice

In Henry VI, part 2, one of Shakespeare’s characters says, The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers. How much more pleasant contemporary life would be if we could say, instead, The first thing we do, let’s kill all the drivers. If that is too severe a decision perhaps it is easier, if one desires to escape the automobile and what it has done to us, to live in Venice. Much of the joy that I find in living in Venice results from this fact: there are no cars. It seems simple enough at first, and most people would certainly think of the obvious: no traffic, no noise, little pollution. Venice, however, has more than its fair share of all three, but the absence of the car still does contribute to one’s daily joy in other ways, ways I have come to believe are more important.

Because we are forced to walk, we are forced to meet. That is, every morning the people of Venice are constrained to see, walk past, walk along with their neighbors. This leads to casual conversation, to the exchange of information about the world or about their personal lives, and invariably it leads to either un caffé or un’ombra, and those in their turn lead to meeting more people and more conversation and the exchange of yet more information.

Because there are no cars, therefore, Venice is free to be, at least for the residents, what its numbers make it: a provincial town of fewer than sixty thousand inhabitants where one of the chief sources of entertainment is gossip and where, consequently, there are no secrets. In order to find out anything, about anyone, one has but to use these casual morning meetings, and someone will quickly be discovered who delivers a warning against the antiques dealer, the dermatologist, or a particular worker in some government office. In a positive sense, these informal exchanges can just as easily turn up the honest cabinetmaker or the best fish stall at Rialto.

Of course, gathering this sort of information is possible anywhere, but in most other cities it requires a trip in the car or a call on the phone. In Venice, you bump into your informant and the bribe is usually little more than coffee and a brioche.

Another gift that a carless Venice provides is the ability, like that given to Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill, of looking into strangers’ lives. Over the course of years, people walk past one another; after a few months, or years, both begin to nod, smile, make some sort of acknowledgment of the other person’s passing. Though these people never emerge from their friendly anonymity, suddenly they appear with a new partner or with children who themselves now have children. They age, they slow down, sometimes they disappear, and one is left, always, wondering just who they are or what they do or what they are like.

One last thing that the absence of the car forces upon us is a daily confrontation with the limits of our physical being. If we want to have it, we have to be able to carry it home or find someone willing to do that for us. Because of this, age is harder to ignore or deny; we get older and we get weaker, and thus we can no longer carry the potatoes, the oranges, and the mineral water. Nor can we any longer do all of our errands in a single day, as it might require walks to the opposite ends of the city, or the vaporetti are too crowded, or there are too many bridges.

In the end I believe that all of these things, trivial as they might appear, work to the ultimate good of those who live here. We live in a time dedicated to the erasure or denial of all physical signs of age or weakness, as well as to the exaltation of the worth of the individual self. Increasingly, we are encouraged to find our sense of community on the Internet, spending endless hours with people we will never see or touch. Venice, in small ways and if only by accident and perhaps sometimes against our will, keeps us safe from this nonsense.

On the Beating Heart

of the City

One of the most enticing things about Venice is the sense of mystery it imposes: there’s never any certainty about what will lie around the next turning or what will be revealed behind the opening door. Novelists, filmmakers, even the common ­tourist—all have been captured by this haunting sense that things will turn out to be different from what they first appear to be.

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of Alberto Peratoner, guardian of the clocktower of San Marco and son and grandson of guardians of the tower, and nowhere is it more evident than in the work that has sustained him and his ancestors for most of this century.

The clock and tower of San Marco were inaugurated on February 1, 1499, and have been for five centuries a perfect symbol of this city. Unlike any other clock of its age and size, this one has two faces. The first gazes out past the statues of San Teodoro and his dragon and the Lion of San Marco at the waters that offered safety to the original builders of the city and that later carried the ships of Venice to the economic conquest of two continents. The second gazes inward, along the narrow length of the Merceria and toward the Rialto, economic heart of the city. Like Venice, the clock aged, and it received major restorations in 1757 and 1858.

Luigi Peratoner became the keeper of the tower and the clock of San Marco in 1916; his son Giovanni took his place in 1945; and the current custodian, Alberto, took over upon his father’s sudden death in 1986. The custodian of the clock has the task of keeping the clock in working order, which means winding its immense and complicated mechanism twice a day and making the many adjustments necessary to keep it telling accurate time. By long tradition, the custodian lives in the tower, which means not only that he lives alongside the ticking heart of the clock but also that he has from his rooftop one of the most breathtaking views of the city, which is itself an endless succession of breathtaking views.

Keeper. Caretaker. In any other city, this might make the hearer think of a stooping man in a blue apron, pockets bursting with strange tools. And a custodian would probably be a bit slow to understand even the most simple things.

But this is Venice, where few things are what they at first seem to be. And so Alberto Peratoner is a university graduate with a degree in philosophy, a man who more or less tumbled into the job upon his father’s death and who, much as he has the ticking of the clock in his blood, finds his intellectual passion in the philosophy of Pascal. He is by no means stooped and apronclad, one of life’s solitaries. Instead, he is a well-dressed and elegantly spoken man who makes no attempt to disguise the love he feels for his wife, Rita Morosini. Nor can he long hide his passion for the music of Handel.

The idea that he is a mere custodian for this, the world’s most famous clock after Big Ben, is entirely misleading. He is, instead, a man who, by virtue of having lived his life alongside and, in a certain sense, inside the all but living mechanism of this clock, has come to know its every whim and whiz and click and bang. He knows intimately the effects of humidity, atmospheric pressure, and sudden changes in temperature upon the clock and the need to counteract their results by the addition of oil of a particular density or the delicate adjustment of a lever.

When asked how he knows which oil to use, how much or how little to adjust the lever, Peratoner smiles and responds with a phrase of Pascal’s, that one needs esprit de finesse to respond to the beating heart of the clock and to understand its many moods.

Peratoner speaks with great pleasure of the fact that Piaget, one of the world’s most prestigious watchmakers, generously offered both financial and technical aid to help with the restoration of the clock, which will take place during the next two years. During that period the clock will be disassembled and taken to a workshop near Mantova, where worn-out pieces will be replaced. After extensive testing, the clock will be returned to Venice and reinstalled in the tower. On February 1, 1999, exactly five hundred years from the date of its inauguration, the clock will again be put into function and will resume measuring out the minutes and the hours of Venice’s days. It is much to be hoped that Alberto Peratoner, custodian and philosopher, will be restored to his home inside the beating heart of the city.

He wasn’t.

Garbage

"Sporcaccione!" I shouted from my window, the word out of my mouth even before I’d had time to give it thought. The man stood there, three floors below, poised with a garbage bag in his hand, about to place it in front of the wall of the building across the canal, the wall that featured a sign forbidding the leaving of garbage. The normal impulse, when someone shouts at you that you’re a filthy pig, is to look up at them and argue the point, but I suppose that’s hard to do when you’ve got a bag of garbage in your hand. Instead, he looked down, thus hiding his face, calmly tossed the bag of garbage into the canal, turned, and walked away.

I don’t know who he was, though he is doubtlessly one of my Venetian neighbors. I wouldn’t recognize him, and that’s probably a good thing, for I’d be forced by anger to repeat my remark.

It is difficult, even in the midst of my thirty-year love affair with them, to say that Italians have anything that could even vaguely be called a civic sense. One glance at any public space is sufficient proof of this: no building, regardless of its beauty, age, or condition, is safe from spray paint and mindless graffiti; the rocks of the Alberoni, the only swimmable beach here, are awash with plastic bottles and bags; rivers teem with the same detritus; and both sides of state highways would provide a fortune in bottle deposits, had Italy a policy of placing deposits on glass bottles.

Yesterday, as I sat in a boat waiting for friends to get the motor working, I had a half hour to watch the garbagemen in front of the Cinema Rossini toss a day’s accumulation of garbage bags into the waiting boat. Though there are points here where papers and newspapers are collected, about a quarter of what got tossed into the barge were sacks and bags filled with neatly folded newspapers, all being sent to be buried and burned, not recycled. Many people assume that the papers that do get put in the recycling bins end up in the garbage anyway. No way to find out, as is true of most things in Italy.

Beyond the boat, a section of the canal had been blocked off and excavated in order to fix a water pipe. It had already been excavated, at enormous expense and over months, only two years before, yet in that time the bottom had accumulated five or six centimeters of black mud, so horrible in appearance as to resist description or analysis. Trapped in that mud were the tokens of two years in Venice: beer bottles, tires, a public garbage can more than a meter high, and countless plastic bags, the telltale signs of garbage casually tossed into the canals.

When they cleaned out the canals around La Fenice a few years ago, I stood on a bridge for hours and watched the crane that took out the initial, large objects from the water while the first stage of the draining was being done. Its jagged claw plunged down into the black water and came up looking like the head of one of Steven Spielberg’s velociraptors, devouring bicycles, tires, distorted pieces of metal that might once have been mattress springs, even a washing machine. Tourists are responsible—at least they get blamed—for a great deal of the damage that is being done to the fabric of the city, but it would be difficult to persuade me that a tourist brings his washing machine to Venice in order to dispose of it in a canal. Further, the city provides a free service for the disposal of large objects. Of course the phone number is busy most of the time, but if you do get through and make a date, garbagemen will show up in a boat and take it away. So there’s no need to toss your washing machine into the canal. Or your bicycle. Or the mattress springs. Or the mattress.

Friends of mine swam in the canals when they were kids. Their parents used the water for cooking. To think of falling into one of the slow, back canals is to conjure up an image that is Dantean in its horror, an experience one would not want to survive.

The Casinò

My first exposure to the Casinò of Venice took place more than thirty years ago, when I fled to Venice after being evacuated from Iran in the wake of the Khomeini revolution. The Casinò seemed, at the time, the sort of place a refugee might like to go, so we went, only to be turned back at the door because my companion wasn’t wearing a jacket. I attempted, quite in vain, to argue that, as refugees, we deserved special treatment. No deal. Admitting defeat, we went back to the hotel and he got his jacket. I forget how much we lost that night; after losing home, possessions, and career it seemed a pittance. But I do remember thinking how much more lively the streets of revolutionary Isfahan had been, where at least people spoke in loud voices and seemed to be enjoying what they were doing, even if that was the destruction of a government.

During the next decades I had no direct experience of the Casinò, though I came to know very well the people who went there to gamble. For ten years I taught in Vicenza, a city about an hour from Venice, and returned home four nights a week on the 10:04 train, which arrived in the Santa Lucia station of Venice at 11:03—barring strikes, fog, accidents, or the many other causes of delay. If we got in on time, and if I ran like a rabbit, I could just make the Number One vaporetto that left the station at 11:06. At first I was only vaguely conscious of the people who got off at San Marcuola, the boat stop for the Casinò, but after a while I began to notice certain common characteristics, and within months I could spot them with unfailing accuracy.

The men all seemed to wear some sort of tonic or spray on their hair, for, no matter how windy the night, their hair was never disturbed by any passing breeze. Most of them wore overcoats or, for a few years, while they were in fashion, sheepskin jackets. Under them, they invariably wore a sports jacket or a suit and tie. Most of them wore rings, usually on the smallest finger of the hand, and most of those had inordinately large stones. The women showed wider variety within the species, probably because they could select among the options provided by different hair length or the choice of slacks or skirt, though almost all of them opted for the second. They all seemed younger than the men they accompanied and tended to wear furs and, while these were in fashion, la pelliccia ecologica (artificial fur) in wild patterns and colors. Their shoes always had high heels and their fingernails showed signs of a great deal of attention and work, as did their makeup.

For a year or so I amused myself by placing silent bets with myself about who would get off at San Marcuola, but my winning became so annoyingly constant that I abandoned the game, ceased to study them, and returned my attention to the lighted windows of the palazzi we passed as we sailed up the Grand Canal.

My interest was renewed because of Zanzibar. In 1992, the police, after more than a month of infiltration and surveillance, put into effect Operation Zanzibar, which took the form of a lightning blitz on the Casinò del Lido, where seven croupiers were arrested, all of whom were charged with stealing from the Casinò. And this month, after more than five years—nur ein